At the essence of many of our social and cultural problems is this relentless economic logic, whose dictates radiate from the concentrated powers of global capital.
Throughout every social institution, the logic of extraction and accumulation is felt, and which overrides the numerous expressions of desire, and expressions of the will, wherever it makes its presence.
The transmission of cultural mythology, and the distribution of information in media becomes subordinate to profit accumulation. The operation of the political machine, the daily administration of legal functions becomes subordinate to profit accumulation. The production of food, the treatment of waste, the maintenance (or neglect) of infrastructure, the construction of shelter, the administration of transportation, all becomes subordinate to profit accumulation. The daily operations of the family come into direct tension with the landlord, or the landowner, or the state, which in turn come into direct tension with the dictates of debt money.
Like a shard of shrapnel embedded in one's chest, perpetually making its presence felt as one tries to breathe, this economic logic is relentlessly present. And so like a repeating pain signal, it is constantly reminding, directing our attention, or otherwise diffusing it.
Profit accumulation as an animating logic becomes so total in the fundamental operations of banking and currency generation, that the entire fabric of society becomes engaged in an ongoing exploitation of itself, constantly mining itself in order to grow and mine itself greater and more deeply.
If one looks at the flow of currency, and sees it as a store of permitted energy, one sees that the energy bends and attracts toward the accumulation of individual power. And so all powerful individuals are engaged in this accumulation, feeding off of what once were concentrations of power in state, cultural, and economic institutions. We are no longer witnessing a coherent organism which has a purpose to survive, but an inertial force whose coherence and drive is generated by a mutual desire for accumulation, and the sympathetic pressures which are generated by this overriding desire. This makes a collective solution very difficult, or impossible, if one is using collective in the sense of collectively directing this existing civilization through the logic with which it has been subsisting.
What is one to do about it? Well, I've discussed this one obsessively, but it is a good subject to obsess over. There is a collective solution, but it means making the individual choice to drop out and realign oneself with a new body of logic, which forms a new collective through its realignment.
